In a grassy clearing at sunset, volunteers tip their gaze toward the moon. They scan the darkening skies until a frenetic flapping breaks the peace.
Like the winged beacon of comic book fame, the tiny creature they’re here for has suddenly zigzagged into view.
Someone points.
Another shouts.
“Bat!”
On this early September night, about two dozen citizen scientists have convened at Green Lake to count bats. As threats to federal research dollars mount and bats continue to face down one of the greatest wildlife disease outbreaks in North American history, understanding where they live and how they use their habitat has become increasingly urgent in Washington state.
Volunteers — retired researchers, students, folks with day jobs and people who just love bats — are playing an ever more critical role fighting for the future of bats: They’re documenting critical habitat, helping scientists with tagging and monitoring species most threatened by white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that’s wiped out millions of bats on the East Coast and put Washington on the map in recent years.
Researchers first detected the disease here in 2016 when hikers near North Bend found a sick bat with visible signs of the illness, which can include crinkly-looking wings and emaciated frames. Washington is the only western state where researchers have documented mass die-offs. Bats with the disease or the fungus that causes it have been found in at least 25 of the state’s 39 counties.
The state has now become a focal point for Western North America scientists developing potential solutions like fungus-fighting vaccines and probiotics.
“From a disease-spread standpoint, Washington is the epicenter,” in Western North America, said Cori Lausen, bat conservation director at Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.
Why love bats
Bats play a vital role in our ecosystems and in human health.
They’re the main predator of nocturnal insects that threaten crops and Washington’s world-leading timber industry; nationally, bats help farmers save billions of dollars in pest control each year. When bats disappear, farmers use more insecticide. Last year, a sobering study published in a major research journal made clear links between white-nose syndrome, local increases in toxic chemicals and an 8% increase in infant mortality.
“There was nothing else (the researcher) could put in the model that would explain that, other than the substantial increase in pesticide use in those same counties over that same time period,” Lausen said.
In Washington, white-nose syndrome and other dangers like wind farms, habitat loss and climate change threaten all 14 of the state’s native bat species, said Abby Tobin, a bat biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. And West Coast bats are especially tough to study: Unlike species elsewhere, they don’t hibernate in big groups and are difficult to track come wintertime.
“We’re a really important case study because we have different species in the West,” said Tobin. But it’s “hard to do any kind of conservation or implement any kind of mitigation against this disease or other threats if you don’t know where they are.”
'Like-minded weirdos'
To aid this work, volunteers are setting up bat boxes, reporting bat colonies, installing acoustic monitors that pick up bats’ echolocation calls, or spending their evenings driving around with mobile monitors. Data they collect signals where bats are active and offers a reference point to help researchers and government agencies spot red flags in the future.
On the lawn at Green Lake, a ghost of gnats swarm AJ Burgin, a volunteer with the nonprofit conservation organization Bats Northwest. “Eat the bugs that are eating me! I’m itchy!” she jokes, before turning her attention skyward.
Community-led events like this one are often at capacity and draw dozens of participants interested in learning about protecting bat habitat or catching sight of these aerial acrobats in the wild.
Burgin is armed with an echometer. Visual displays of bat calls — a series of high-pitched, synthy squeaks — appear as oscillations on her smartphone; another volunteer logs each time a bat passes in and out of view. Their reports are fed into a broader community-gathered database run by the Woodland Park Zoo and could eventually be used by conservationists to show why this area is an important zone for bat foraging, travel and access to water.
“I’ve loved bats for a super long time,” says Burgin, 39, who studied original vampire mythology as part of her Ph.D. research.
“Being able to teach like-minded weirdos to learn and then to take that learning and put it into action … that feels like research that matters.”
Going nocturnal
It’s nightfall at a gas station in Bothell, and Albert Meerscheidt, 70, is fussing with a DIY bat-detection device that has detached from his car’s roof.
Meerscheidt’s homemade antenna — a broomstick attached to an acoustic monitoring device — is central to tonight’s mission: capturing bat calls along 19 miles of back roads leading toward Cottage Lake.
Meerscheidt, a retired computer instructor, came to love bats after climbing around in caves over the past several decades. His partner Bernice Tannenbaum, 78, wrote her dissertation on bats’ social behavior.
The pair are board members for Bats Northwest and are known as particularly devoted conservationists. Their attic workroom — low-ceilinged, cavelike — contains a mélange of bat monitoring gear and educational materials. A taxidermied Big Brown Bat rests inside a glass shadowbox. A plastic bat skeleton spreads hand-like wings across the top of a storage shelf.
This is the first summer the couple have volunteered for the relatively labor-intensive job of surveying bat activity by car.
Meerscheidt and Tannenbaum aren’t typically nocturnal. But to do this work they’re forced to wait until after dark.
“That’s the way it is with wildlife,” Tannenbaum smiles. “You have to suit their schedules!”
It’s nearing the end of the summer season, when female bats gathered in groups to give birth and raise their pups. Washington’s geology doesn’t lend itself to extensive, accessible cave systems, so their domains range from urban — under bridges, roofs or inside old buildings — to wild, like small caves or dead, hollowed-out trees.
Baby bats need lots of food to fatten up before their first hibernation season; to sustain themselves and their young, mother bats leave the roost at night to eat thousands of mosquitoes, beetles, moths and other insects.
Most bat species in Washington rear only one pup a year, making bat populations particularly vulnerable to diseases like white-nose syndrome, Tannenbaum says.
The fungus that causes the syndrome thrives in the exact conditions most bats seek during hibernation. When bats go dormant, their immune systems slow. It’s an energy-saving adaptation that gets them through the winter but also makes it easier for the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, to invade and irritate the bats’ skin. This itchiness has deadly consequences: Bats rouse more often, causing them to burn critical fat stores or exit hibernation months ahead of schedule. Starved and dehydrated, they’re suddenly on the hunt for food long before bug season.
Bat tracking
To locate prey, bats produce sound waves at frequencies so high they’re inaudible to the human ear. With his bat detector now properly attached, Meerscheidt starts the engine and Tannenbaum hits “record” on her tablet. Specialized software slows the bat sounds to make the calls audible in real time and maps their recordings against a sound library of known species.
Meerscheidt flips on his hazard lights and cruises at 12 miles per hour — fast enough to avoid counting the same bat twice but slow enough to clearly capture calls … and annoy more than a few drivers along the way.
He takes a wrong turn down a residential street when, suddenly, two quick chirps pierce the silence.
“And now we get a bat!” Tannenbaum peps.
She’s hopeful, she says, because she knows researchers with drive and expertise are working furiously on solutions. Passionate volunteers are collecting data that can be fed into state and national databases and “doing some things (academics) aren’t doing,” she says, to help fill in the gaps.
But the menace of white-nose syndrome is never far from Meerscheidt’s mind.
“Part of our world has disappeared,” he says.
‘A crossroads’
To test a bat for white-nose syndrome, Meg Lunnum puts on protective goggles, turns down the lights and holds a UV flashlight to its wings. The telltale sign of the infectious fungus: a bright orange glow.
In the years before the syndrome showed up here, Lunnum, 78, remembers being horrified by images from the East Coast. Piles of bats, dead from the disease. When Washington bats started getting sick, Lunnum, who runs a permitted bat rescue in Stanwood, agreed to help.
Only two of 20 survived that first year. She’s had better luck since. At her bat infirmary — an 8x8 converted garden shed in her backyard — Lunnum keeps bats warm, fed, hydrated and, using tiny syringes to dispense medication, free from pain.
Although bats can recover from the syndrome — one of their many adaptations is their ability to regrow wing tissue — there’s no known cure.
Researchers want to prevent bats from getting deadly ill from the disease in the first place.
Lausen and collaborators on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border are racing to create a bulwark against the syndrome’s spread outside Washington state lines. The disease has yet to turn up in bats in Western Canada and hasn’t been observed in states like Oregon and California. For the past few summers, the researchers have sprayed a probiotic dust (cultured from healthy bat skin microbes) into Washington maternity roosts; early results, Lausen says, suggest some bats are developing resilience against the fungus that causes the deadly syndrome.
“We’re actually at a crossroads now, like, can we keep this project afloat?” said Lausen, noting that Trump-era research cuts have thrown the project’s future grant funding into limbo.
Citizen science has become even more critical at this moment. A vast majority of the people involved in the probiotic experiment are volunteers, Lausen said. She and her colleagues designed it this way.
“We can’t possibly go treat hundreds and hundreds of bat boxes across western North America … It can be only cost effective and (practical) to hit as many roosts as possible by engaging citizens to be able to do this.” Her ultimate goal is to ship the probiotic to anyone who wants it.
Back at the infirmary, Lunnum is treating four sick bats, including one with white-nose syndrome. Whenever she takes in a bat, she makes a point to log where they’ve come from, and once they’re well, return them home.
The bat with white-nose syndrome, she said, is steadily improving.
“It looks really good,” she said. “I’m thinking it can probably be released.”
